There are two places I can think of that use "dots" to denote unseen pages or screens on the iPhone: in the Weather widget and in Safari's "pages" mode.

In the Weather widget, you can use horizontal area of the screen where the dots are as an alternative navigation method. While you 'swipe' the panels to move them out of the way, you can swipe the opposite direction in the dots area, swiping 'to' the direction you want to go. Alternately, you can also just tap to the left or right of the dots to move the weather panels in that direction.

I thought that same method might remain consistent in Safari, but it does not. However, in trying to get it to work, I did discover that instead of swiping from one page to another in Safari, tapping on the edge of the screen where you see the edges of other web pages will also allow you to move from one page to another.